


Time Stretches On

by ambivalentlangst



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst with a Bad Ending, God!Lance, Hurt No Comfort, Immortal!Lance, It's a background thing, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess, Lance kills a binch, Lance manipulates quintessence, Langst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Okay so I saw this one shitpost right, Yeah I hate me too, and it made a joke about Lance being immortal but I was like, everyone suffers, ish, okay not fully but it's similar and he's magic so we're going with if, the Sheith isn't really important, they love him so much but Lance isn't having it, wait, you could make angst out of this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-24 12:05:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12012351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambivalentlangst/pseuds/ambivalentlangst
Summary: Lance had never wanted to live forever.





	Time Stretches On

**Author's Note:**

> also posted on my tumblr, under the same title and name :)

Lance had never wanted to live forever. He’d also never wanted to particularly die, but who did? No, he’d wanted to live out an albeit long, but very fulfilling life, settled down with his significant other after a time spent amongst the stars, surrounded by family and his kids until the day he hopefully passed away in his sleep. A simple, ideal way to die.

Lance had never wanted to be captured either. Haggar, he swore he’d kill the witch. In those long weeks in Galra captivity she’d modified his DNA, so that his body fed off the quintessence in the universe. Never enough to harm anything, or so she had assumed as she had her fun after they found he couldn’t be persuaded into talking. Lance didn’t suspect until a year after his rescue, staring at himself in the mirror. He hadn’t changed much, the barest hints of baby fat still clinging to the hollows of his cheeks. His undiluted blue eyes met his own gaze, striking in the light of the castle. Aside from the scar crossing his left eyebrow, and another scraping the top of his lip in fact it appeared he hadn’t changed at all. Odd, but Lance pushed past it. At least he was keeping his pretty face. It probably didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, right?

Over the course of the months that followed, Lance discovered he had new abilities like Allura did. The ability to manipulate quintessence, use it for better or for worse. His veins glowed the same as the energy source for weeks afterwards, until he couldn’t remember what he looked like without it. He tried to ignore the change for the time, knowing it helped. He pushed out any memories reminding of who else had that ability.

Another year, and Lance knew for certain. Pidge’s hair had grown long, and she’d filled out in other places as well. Allura’s face had been thinned from war, and Shiro had a few creases around his lips, his hair shaggy and often tied back. Hunk had followed suit, and Lance was loathe to tell his friend he was now sporting the beginnings of a mullet. Keith had grown another few inches, standing a hair above him now. Lance had been frozen. He remained all long limbs, features stuck between being a boy and a man. His scars had been glossed over, undoubtedly from all the quintessence he used. In fact, it had smoothed out his features, and even without his skin care regimen he looked flawless. The only significant change that had been made at all was constant glow running through his blood, and more recently, the shift in hue it had made to the blue eyes his mother had adored. Instead, they glowed a pupiless purple. A purple the enemy they were fighting adored. He didn’t mention anything, not to his teammates, not even to himself. He locked what he knew about himself away, watching those he loved grow while he remained just as he had the day he’d been captured. 

More recently, he’d found he had feelings for two certain paladins too. Lance thought about it for a long time, whether to say something or not. In the end he was silent. His team hadn’t paid the time Lance did to his appearance. They hadn’t noticed he hadn’t changed, not in the midst of saving the universe. Lance didn’t blame them and knew he wouldn’t ever bring it up, similar to his feelings for Keith and Shiro. He’d never let the men grow old without him, burden them with the knowledge that they were leaving their lover with an eternally broken heart. Instead he watched as they got together instead, and pretended not to notice the looks they gave him everywhere he went.

Five years after he was captured was when someone finally said something about it. Pidge had been teasing Shiro about his thirtieth, how he was getting old, to which the man responded,

“Hey, we can’t all be Lance!” The boy didn’t laugh, pausing at his spot washing dishes. He hoped the comment would pass. It didn’t. The conversation went on, ignoring Lance’s silence.

“True, he hasn’t aged a day,” she admitted, looking enviously to him. Physically, she was older now, at nineteen. Lance had a white knuckled grip on the plate he held, while the water dripping off it took on a familiar magenta hue, matching the veins in the hand holding it.

“Lance?” Shiro asked, the same all too concerned tone in his stupid voice. The brunette set the plate in the sink, turning off the water and stepping away before he caused an accident.

“She’s right,” he murmured. “I haven’t aged a day.” He looked up, casting the glow of his eyes and now tears in the black paladin’s direction. “Not since Haggar got her hands on me.”

Lance cried himself to sleep that night, ignoring the pounding on his bedroom door from the six other people on the ship. He’d never grow old with anybody, he’d never have someone for the rest of his life. Seventeen he would remain, forever.

Lance watched his friends slip through his fingers. As the years flew by and blurred together he watched a shock of silver thread it’s way through Keith’s hair every time he visited the planet he and Shiro finally settled on. Watched Hunk’s hands grow wrinkled and pained from years of engineering, coated with the dust of the Balmera. Even though they’d fought and won, Lance could not save them from age. Wouldn’t wish to, anyways. He wouldn’t condemn his friends to the same fate as him. He was there at each of their funerals, assumed to be a younger relative, or something similar. Voltron had been hidden away again, the location entrusted to the ageless boy who’d sobbed under the shadow of far too many gravestones.  
Lance never took a lover, never had anything more than simple flings despite how many had begged, pleaded with the ethereal, glowing boy to stay. He was never cruel, but he had no true interest. They were things to keep away the coldness of his reality, of knowing the men he had loved were buried across the universe side by side, lost to him forever. He wandered his way through the universe, searching and searching for the one person left who could give him a sense of fulfillment. A witch who had escaped Voltron’s grasp as the empire finally fell, and the one person Lance truly wanted dead.

She was unlike him, corrupting herself with a constant craving for more. Perhaps if Lance learned to enjoy his infinite lifetime things would be different, the universe would take it out on him. Instead, it was simply how he lived. He’d saved the universe, and now the universe appeared to have chosen a form of payment someone else had negotiated for him.   
He scoured the cosmos for years until he found her, on a remote thing that was closer to an asteroid than a planet, harvesting quintessence from a nearby star. Lance tore her apart with it.

The battle raged for days between the two of them, Haggar strong from practice and wisdom, Lance by youth and ingenuity. She screamed at him to give up, to join her and build up something greater than what he’d destroyed. Lance merely smiled, the blood dripping from his lips glowing like everything else about him. He was consumed in the light, exchanging blow for blow mercilessly. By the time he finally bested her he flared up almost brighter than the star nearby, Haggar only made immune to the unrelenting brightness from her own power. Lance annihilated her in a blaze of hatred and energy, tearing her apart molecule by molecule until she could not even be called stardust. Then, Lance set off. And after destroying the witch, he rescued instead. As the legend of Voltron faded until time called for it to rise again, a different one arose. Of a boy who glowed magenta, whose smile always seemed a tiny bit sad no matter the circumstance. Who never changed, and kept himself alive despite all odds stacked against him. Someday, Lance would lay himself to rest. After he trained the next generation, guided along by the memories of the friends he’d lost so many years ago. But for now, he traveled until he was needed again


End file.
